Inside the Club for Growth's art of war

The California congressional candidate sat patiently for two hours as the questions just kept coming. His soft-spoken, bearded inquisitor took handwritten notes as he probed every aspect of the candidate’s past: where he had lived, the schools he attended, his grades, any run-ins with authority. The only thing missing from the interrogation was a naked bulb swinging from the ceiling.

For David Harmer, a cerebral banking compliance attorney running an underdog House race, the scrutiny was worth it: At the end of the process, he was a Club for Growth candidate.

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Among the conservative outside groups that have shaken up GOP politics over the past half-decade, no organization matches the intensity of the Club’s endorsement process. Nor, for that matter, does any group match the Club in its ability to upend primaries and drag the Republican Party and its candidates to the right.

This midterm season, the Club for Growth is the pre-eminent institution promoting Republican adherence to a free-market, free-trade, anti-regulation agenda. It has endorsed only seven candidates so far, including three who are challenging Republican incumbents, and will back each of them to the hilt. The Club’s choices — and its screening process — are in essence a road map for the electoral agenda of economic conservatives in 2014.

About half a dozen hopefuls tramp through the Club’s offices in downtown Washington each week to plead for the group’s support, subjecting themselves to an interview and vetting process that several described as intrusive, even offensive, in its scope.

Doug Hoffman, whom the Club endorsed for Congress as a Conservative Party candidate from New York in 2010, called the experience a “baptism by fire.” Another — a Republican who won the support of other national conservative and tea party groups, but not the Club — used less flattering terms for his interlocutors.

“They’re not even pleasant,” the Republican said: “I went in there and was already playing defense. It was very prosecutorial.”

There’s a reason why candidates keep lining up for the hazing: Club for Growth Action spent $17 million supporting candidates last cycle, according to finance reports. That doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands of earmarked dollars from Club supporters that pour into favored candidates’ campaign accounts.

The group often puts that money behind seemingly long-shot opponents to entrenched GOP lawmakers or Democratic incumbents. Harmer, who called his interview a “very painstaking, from the cradle up to the minute, review of my life,” said the Club’s support was essential to bringing him within a hair’s breadth of defeating a Democratic incumbent in a blue-leaning Bay Area district in 2010.

Would-be presidential candidates, several of whom the Club helped elect in the first place, go out of their way to maintain its good favor. At a recent hush-hush retreat for Club donors, prominent conservative White House hopefuls including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul were in attendance, as well as Indiana Gov. Mike Pence and Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, himself a former Club for Growth president.

If there are corners of the Republican establishment where the Club’s name remains toxic, the man who helms the group is placidly indifferent. Chris Chocola, a tanned, 52-year-old former Indiana congressman who sports a low-key demeanor and a pin on his chest reading “Everything is Fine,” said in a recent interview that the Club is more confident than ever of its methods.

“If we do things that make people uncomfortable or tick them off, that’s fine. But if we do things that surprise people, that’s not fine. We should be very predictable,” said Chocola, who presides over an 11-person staff housed in a nondescript office suite. “We have a model that has matured over time and we’ve learned from election cycles what we think our role is and how it’s done, and we try to stick to it.”

‘Calculated risks’

There’s a reason for the scarcity of Club endorsements this year. Where other conservative groups have sought to create havoc in as many primaries as possible — the Senate Conservatives Fund, for one, has endorsed plainly flawed, underdog challengers to incumbents in Kansas and Kentucky — the Club prefers to engage in fewer races and have a dramatic impact in each.

Chocola, a well-coiffed man of substantial personal wealth who spends his winters in Florida, ticks off a simple calculus the Club uses. The most appealing targets are open seats in conservative states, he says, followed by districts and states where Republican incumbents are failing to meet the Club’s ideological standards. Third on the priority list are seats held by incumbent Democrats.

In every district or state where the Club might get involved, the group takes a poll to ascertain whether there is a path to victory. It polls far more potential targets than it ever gets involved in, strategists say; nearly every survey is conducted by the media-averse GOP pollster Jon Lerner, who is viewed by his peers in the consulting world as a gray eminence with outsized influence at the Club.

So far this year, the Club has picked a few candidates in each target category: It has backed primary challengers to Reps. Mike Simpson of Idaho and Ralph Hall of Texas, as well as Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran. Arkansas Rep. Tom Cotton, whom the Club endorsed for his first House race, has won the group’s support in his bid against Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor. The Club has backed former Alaska Attorney General Dan Sullivan’s campaign against Democratic Sen. Mark Begich, and endorsed conservative college president Ben Sasse for Nebraska’s open Senate seat.